What makes sense?

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Vanity Fair, Time and dozens of other commentators, politicians
and flacks are leaping on the weapons of mass destruction story. Their
premise: The Bush administration suckered the American people into a war
based on assertions they knew to be false.

Here's Time magazine: "How do you take your country to war when
it doesn't really want to go? ... If you need a lot of troops to prevail and
you would like to remind everyone in the neighborhood who's boss anyway,
then what you need most is a good reason -- something to stir up the folks
back home." Now that's a rather breathtaking accusation when you stop to
consider it. The Bush administration, motivated only by a desire to throw
its weight around, concocts a false story about WMDs to "stir up" the folks
back home.

We've been the occupying power in Iraq for about 10 weeks, and
many of us thought we'd have uncovered stockpiles of WMDs by now. But why
are so many prepared, on this basis alone, to begin throwing around the
accusation that the Bush administration lied to the world? At the very
least, other explanations ought to be considered.

Let's start with the history. Saddam's nuclear ambitions go back
at least to 1981, when Israel destroyed the (French-built) nuclear reactor
at Osirak. Following the Gulf War, Iraq acknowledged that it had resumed
work on a nuclear bomb. As for chemical and biological weapons, the United
Nations has confirmed Iraq's possession on multiple occasions.

The United Nations stated that "field tests of biological
warfare agents started in late 1987/early 1988." In 1991, after surrendering
to coalition forces, Iraq presented a list of its banned weapons to UNSCOM,
the U.N. agency responsible for overseeing the ceasefire. Iraq then
acknowledged some 10,000 nerve gas warheads, 1,500 chemical weapons, 412
tons of chemical weapons agents, 25 long-range missiles and more. Yet these
proved to be understatements, as inspectors found more than these declared
weapons.

Throughout the 1990s, the Iraqis did everything possible to
frustrate the mission of UNSCOM -- hiding documents, playing cat and mouse,
even on one occasion keeping the U.N. inspectors imprisoned in their cars in
a parking lot outside a nuclear facility for four days.

In 1998, Saddam threw out the inspectors altogether, prompting
President Clinton to launch a cruise missile attack on the Iraqi Republican
guard. Our mission, Clinton explained to the American people, was to "attack
Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological programs, and its capacity to
threaten its neighbors."

Other countries had such weapons, Clinton continued, but "with
Saddam there's one big difference; he has used them, not once but
repeatedly -- unleashing chemical weapons against Iranian troops (and)
against civilians . . ."

Ratcheting up the pressure in 2002, President Bush convinced the
United Nations to resume inspections in Iraq. The purpose of these
inspections was not to find Iraq's banned weapons, but to see proof that
Iraq had, as it claimed, destroyed them. For weeks, U.N. inspectors drove to
sites of previous WMD production and found nothing.

To those who opposed the war and who, more to the point,
passionately oppose President Bush, this -- combined with our failure to
find huge caches of weapons in the past two months -- suggests conspiracy
and bad faith.

But this is absurd. That Iraq once possessed these weapons is
not in dispute. Are we to believe that Saddam destroyed them voluntarily but
refused to provide proof of that destruction to the United Nations even as
U.S. and British forces massed on his border? He knew that proof of the
weapons' destruction would avoid the war and his own removal.

Surely it is obvious that only three scenarios are possible. 1)
Saddam secreted the weapons to Syria or some other country. 2) Saddam hid
the weapons extremely well and they will be found eventually. 3) Saddam
destroyed the weapons at the last minute before the war began.

I favor No. 2. The discovery of those biological weapons trucks
suggests that, just as defectors have told us, great expense was undertaken
to keep Saddam's weapons well-hidden.

The capacity of Bush' opponents to believe the worst about
him -- even if it means giving the benefit of the doubt to Saddam Hussein --
is staggering.

Comment on JWR contributor Mona Charen's column by clicking here. Purchase her just published book, "Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the
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